OpenAI Swarm

Swarm is OpenAI's experimental framework for multi-agent handoffs in Python — minimal, readable, and a good way to learn the patterns of multi-agent design before committing to a production framework. The codebase fits in your head, which is rare in this category.

It's explicitly positioned by OpenAI as educational rather than production-grade. There's no observability layer, no deployment story, and no committment to ongoing maintenance. The handoff pattern (agents passing control to each other) is well-illustrated and easy to reason about, which is exactly the point.

For learning multi-agent patterns, for short-lived experiments, and for one-off internal tools where production-grade isn't needed, Swarm is the easiest way in. For anything that needs to run reliably under SLA, graduate to LangGraph or CrewAI before deploying.